I don’t know. Can we? Have a look at the photo posted by CNN of Melania Trump seated next to Putin at the G20 dinner for world leaders, two seats away from Angela Merkel. Trump reportedly took Melania’s place at some point as the dinner wore on. If Trump was going to sell out Europe and NATO to the Russian bear, he’d probably find a more discreet way to do it than by chatting with the President of Russia right in front of the Chancellor of Germany. A private hourlong meeting between Trump and Putin with only Putin’s translator in attendance would be suspicious. A public meeting during a major dinner seems less so.

The dinner conversation with Putin was first reported Monday by Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients. Bremmer said the meeting began “halfway” into the meal and lasted “roughly an hour.”…

Trump, who is among the newest world leaders in the G-20, remained at the dinner for the entire night. He was among the last to leave — after the host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had already departed. Pool reporters with the president saw Putin’s motorcade leave at 11:50 p.m., followed shortly by Trump, who departed the concert hall at 11:54 p.m.

Leaders who witnessed the meeting were “bemused, nonplussed, befuddled” by the animated conversation, held in full view — but apparently not within listening distance — of others present, Bremmer said by telephone. He said he spoke with two participants at the dinner.

Is Bremmer the only source for the length of the conversation?

Another question: Is it unusual for the president to be unattended by a national security officer at a dinner like this? When the news first broke last night that Trump and Putin had chatted privately, with no other Americans around, it sounded like a breach of protocol. Why would Trump want to chat with the leader of Russia without any witnesses from his own side to the conversation? The White House, though, claims that there were no staff for any of the world leaders at the dinner. It was just them, their spouses, and a translator — and since Trump was seated near Shinzo Abe, he had a translator with him who spoke Japanese, not Russian. If he was intent on chatting with Putin, he was stuck using Putin’s translator. (Or, of course, he could have insisted on a translator who spoke Japanese and Russian before the dinner began, expecting that he’d want to chat with Putin at some point.)

The hardest punch you can land on him here based on what we know now, I think, is that it was a bad idea for him to seek Putin out for a chat even in a crowded room, both due to the optics amid the Russiagate investigation and the fact that he should want experienced American foreign policy hands around him to help him negotiate the conversation. (“What kind of information was President Putin conveying as fact to our president and potentially misleading him?”) But that just brings you back to the evergreen question about Trump’s interest in Putin: Is it nefarious/collusive or just tone-deaf and dunderheaded? Or, er, a little of both?

At worst, [Capitol Hill Republicans] seemed to believe Team Trump’s collusion amounted to a “conspiracy of dunces” (as a recent Ross Douthat column termed it)—embarrassing and unseemly, sure, but certainly not so grave as to demand blowing up the entire GOP agenda to address it.

“I think most of us agree that if something did happen, it wasn’t anything malicious … it’s just chalked up to [Trump and his advisers] not being very smart,” one senior Senate aide told me. “When people are pointing to Carter Page as someone who colluded, I don’t have any problem believing that… There are so many people who associate themselves with campaigns that are clowns.” Even the meeting Donald Trump Jr. orchestrated with a Kremlin-linked lawyer was seen as evidence of bumbling ineptitude more than high crimes and misdemeanors.

Trump being Trump, my guess is that he tried to schmooze Putin at the dinner, not conduct serious policy talks with him. Nothing bad could come from that, right?

Two clips here, one of Scarborough and the other of Corey Lewandowski spinning the Trump/Putin chat in his own inimitable way.

Update: A source confirms to BuzzFeed that Trump and Putin did in fact speak for about an hour, and that that was the most unusual thing about the incident. World leaders making small talk is par for the course at events like this. Extended conversations are not.

What caught other leaders’ attention when Trump walked over to Putin towards the end of the evening was not that the conversation was happening — but how long it lasted. A source present on the night told BuzzFeed News the two chatted for a “long time”, emphasizing the point – “long” – several times in an exchange of messages.

Alternate headline: “Joe Scarborough was still a Republican?” He’s been ranting about gun control for years!

The best thing about this is the number of righteously bitchy tweets it unleashed last night among anti-Trumpers who blame Scarborough, not incorrectly, for having helped create the Frankenstein that’s now chased him out of the GOP.

Joe brings friend to party, friend pisses on carpet and lights it on fire.

My job description all but requires me to fit this otherwise banal announcement into some larger political framework, so here you go: If Scarborough’s thinking of running against Trump in 2020, whether for self-promotional reasons, as revenge for Trump’s shots at him and Mika, or because he genuinely believes making Trump a one-termer is an urgent national priority, it makes way more sense to do it as an independent than as a Republican. He’d get obliterated in a primary as a Kasich-style centrist GOPer, but with enough money behind him and enough of a downturn in Trump’s job approval, he could pull enough center-right votes away from Trump in the general election to make life harder for the president in a tight race with a Democrat. He has a lot of friends in politics both from his congressional days and from “Morning Joe.” All he’d need are a few rich Trump-hating centrists like Mike Bloomberg to pony up and it’s not crazy to imagine him pulling, say, five percent of the Republican vote as an independent. The question is whether he’d unintentionally end up pulling a similar number of Democratic votes from the other party’s nominee too, defeating the entire anti-Trump purpose of his effort. In the end, his support might be too purple to do Trump any real damage. Especially when you consider that Scarborough seems likely to do better in blue states than in Rust Belt battlegrounds.

Anyway, is his hair usually this Eraserhead or was it purposely jacked up last night on Colbert’s show for the midlife-crisis musical performance? In terms of pure altitude, I’d put him somewhere between early Elvis Costello and vintage Lyle Lovett.

This really is such a money scam both sides are running. As Dan McLaughlin said a few days ago when Trump tweeted his CNN GIF, pro wrestling perfectly encapsulates his relationship with the media. The drama of the conflict is riveting, but at base it’s all manufactured for mutual profit. A lot, lot, lot of mutual profit.

In keeping with the metaphor, we’re at the apex right now of Joe-n-Mika’s “heel turn.” They were good guys during the primaries, when they couldn’t stop babbling about Trumpmania; then came the falling out and now they’re in a feud with the hero, with this past week the political equivalent of Wrestlemania. The beauty of this con, though, is that it works both ways: To “Morning Joe” fans, of course, it’s Trump who’s the villain. If and when the narrative eventually calls for reconciliation between the two, they’ll join forces once again and battle amnesty supporters or Syria doves or whoever in a political-media tag-team match.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reached their biggest audience ever when they talked Friday about President Donald Trump’s tweets about their show.

The Nielsen company said Wednesday that 1.66 million people watched the MSNBC morning show the day after the tweets. That narrowly beat the show’s previous record, which came the day after Trump was elected last year…

We can beat this metaphor even more. Trump’s “facelift” tweet about Mika Brzezinski was so harsh for a sitting president that it operates like a steel chair to the back when the ref isn’t looking. Was that out of bounds or a warrior just doing what he needs to win? Morning Consult took a poll. Bad news for the White House:

Overall, when asked if the tweets made them view Trump more or less favorably, registered voters split, er, 17/51. Even Republicans were a tepid 28/25. If you’re curious what share of the party, exactly, will defend Trump on pretty much anything, there’s your answer in black and white. Twenty-eight percent.

One more poll for you, this time from Axios. In the Trump version of the Hulk Hogan/Andre the Giant feud, i.e. the White House vs. CNN, who’s winning? Results:

That’s surprisingly competitive among independents, and note that that poll was taken before CNN’s latest fiasco. For all of the network’s effort to position itself as a beacon of truth in an age of dark Trumpian deceit, it may not be long before more Americans trust the White House than they do CNN.

By the way, Scarborough and Brzezinski will be on Stephen Colbert’s show next Tuesday to cash in discuss their many concerns about Trump’s presidency and, perhaps, to perform a song or two. Exit question: If I’m right that these kayfabe wrestling-style feuds with Trump are pure gold for the media, how do you explain this?

CNN's total viewership from Wednesday. That their primetime lineup is all under 1 million is something else…this a major issue. pic.twitter.com/U1WSQwHRoE

Befitting the fact that health-care reform is a Republican-only endeavor in the Senate, it’s a “GOP vs. GOP” battle over the subject on today’s Sunday shows. Making the case for moderates is John Kasich, one of many Republican governors leery of rolling back ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Kasich is term-limited and won’t have to suffer the consequences if McConnell’s bill scales down Medicaid funding; other governors aren’t as lucky. He’ll be on “This Week” to try to push Trump and the Senate towards the center.

Opposing him are a trio of Senate conservatives who want more robust repeal of ObamaCare. Rand Paul will be on “Fox News Sunday,” Ben Sasse will guest on “State of the Union,” and Mike Lee will appear on “Face the Nation.” Lee is the most interesting of the three as he and Ted Cruz are trying to broker a deal that can get through both houses and onto Trump’s desk. He also criticized the current bill a few days ago for neglecting the middle class in order to benefit the rich, signaling that he’s open to compromise that might appeal to moderate Republicans.

Bernie Sanders will also be on “State of the Union” to talk health care. He’s irrelevant to the current debate but, let’s face it, his preferred system is the one we’re going to end up with eventually. The only question is when. The full line-up is at the AP.

Did we need three separate posts today about Trump and Scar-zinski farting at each other? No. But on the evening before a holiday weekend, this is the level of effort you get.

Besides, as this turns weirder and more personal, I think it may end up being the best Trump feud since the salad days of him tangling with Rosie O’Donnell. We can’t be more than a few days away from Trump dropping a “my wife’s hotter than yours” tweet on Joe, which will blow the entirety of American media sky high. In the meantime, what’s the most scandalous bit from this new Vanity Fair piece? The idea that Trump was allegedly interested in knowing who did Mika’s chin tuck? Or the claim that Donald J. Trump … apologized?

[Brzezinski] said that she had told Melania Trump about the procedure when the couple stopped by Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve. “The irony of it all is that Donald kept saying, ‘That’s incredible. You can’t even tell. Who did it? Who did it?’ He kept asking for the name of the doctor. He literally asked 10 times. ‘Is he down here? Who is he?’” Scarborough recalled. (A spokesman from the White House declined to comment.)…

Last summer, [Trump] tweeted that Brzezinski was “a neurotic and not very bright mess!” and threatened to “tell the real story” about their relationship.

Afterward, they said that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, brokered a meeting with the four of them. Brzezinski said she explained that the tweet had caused a lot of hurt to her children and family. Trump, she said, apologized.

I wonder which allegation will offend Trump more. Probably the apology. An alpha male needs to care about his looks, but he must never, ever grovel.

Over at WaPo, Erik Wemple asks an excellent question. If Joe and Mika were so scandalized by Trump’s alleged blackmail attempt via the Enquirer, why did it take until now for the public to hear about it? What were they sitting on that information for?

This extraordinary waste of taxpayer dollars took place weeks or months ago. It’s better to have the scoop later than never. But: Why do we have to wait for Trump to slander “Morning Joe” on Twitter before we find out about it all? The Erik Wemple Blog has lobbed the following questions at a representative of NBC News: “When was ‘Morning Joe’ planning to drop the Enquirer bombshell? Why not report it shortly after it happened? When DID it happen? And if it wasn’t publishable then, why is it now?”

Considering how long they’ve known each other and the circles they move in, it’s possible that Trump and Joe/Mika are each sitting on piles of dirt about the other, reluctant to release anything for fear of mutually assured destruction but willing to engage in limited attacks under the circumstances as the feud turns nastier. Maybe Scarborough was worried that Trump would hit him with something unflattering if he revealed the alleged blackmail attempt, then decided he might as well reveal it after Trump went after him and Brzezinski on Twitter. Although there’s an alternate explanation:

What if Scarborough implied he'd give Trump friendlier coverage in exchange for having the Enquirier story killed?

What if Scarborough was the one who put a quid pro quo on the table? Kill the Enquirer story and maybe the daily accusations on “Morning Joe” about Trump being unstable get toned down. Do nothing to kill the Enquirer story and maybe they get ramped up. Is that why Joe sat on the “blackmail” attempt — because his own texts with Jared Kushner would muddy the waters of who exactly was trying to put the squeeze on whom?

Life is so complicated now. It used to be so sweet and simple. In hindsight, I think this was the moment we all first realized he was presidential timber.

An update to this morning’s drama from Gabriel Sherman, who’s no Trump booster and has no incentive to take sides against Joe Scarborough given that he’s a contributor to MSNBC himself.

This doesn’t sound like blackmail, although much depends on who reached out to whom first and which side brought the Enquirer story into the conversation.

According to three sources familiar with the private conversations, what happened was this: After the inauguration, Morning Joe’s coverage of Trump turned sharply negative. “This presidency is fake and failed,” Brzezinski said on March 6, for example. Around this time, Scarborough and Brzezinski found out the Enquirer was preparing a story about their affair. While Scarborough and Brzezinski’s relationship had been gossiped about in media circles for some time, it was not yet public, and the tabloid was going to report that they had left their spouses to be together.

In mid-April, Scarborough texted with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner about the pending Enquirer story. Kushner told Scarborough that he would need to personally apologize to Trump in exchange for getting Enquirer owner David Pecker to stop the story. (A spokesperson for Kushner declined to comment). Scarborough says he refused, and the Enquirer published the story in print on June 5, headlined “Morning Joe Sleazy Cheating Scandal!”

That reads to me like Scarborough went to Kushner for help with the Enquirer story and Kushner responded by essentially saying, understandably, “Why should the president do you any favors?” If so, that’s not blackmail. That’s refusing to do a solid for a friend turned enemy. Another White House source gave a similar story to the Fox News:

Scarborough called senior adviser Jared Kushner, with whom Scarborough has a friendly relationship, to ask about a National Enquirer article slated to run in early June regarding the relationship between Scarborough and Brzezinski, who have since announced their engagement.

Scarborough asked Kushner if there was anything that could be done about the article, the source said, given Trump’s friendship with David Pecker, the chief executive of The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media. Kushner allegedly told Scarborough that the former Republican congressman needed to talk to the president himself about the issue, to which Scarborough replied that Trump was angry at him. The source said Kushner answered: “Well, then maybe you should apologize.”

It ain’t blackmail if that’s how it went down. (This may be the first time Fox News and Gabriel Sherman are in sync on a Trump story, too.) Two complicating factors, though. One: If Kushner brought up the Enquirer story before Scarborough did, obviously the dynamic changes. Then the request for an apology from Scarborough starts to feel more like an offer of a quid pro quo, which is more like blackmail. That’s what Scarborough claims happened, in fact. In this morning’s op-ed, he says it was White House staffers who “warned” him that the Enquirer story was in the works, a charge he repeated later today on “Morning Joe.” If he first learned of the story through Kushner or some other Trump deputy then the charge of extortion is sturdier.

Two: Even if Scarborough learned about the Enquirer story independently, he may have suspected — not unreasonably, given Trump’s history — that the White House was behind it, a bit of revenge for months of Scar-zinski’s vicious daily attacks. If that’s true then the apology request looks more sinister, a ploy to silence a high-profile critic in the media by feeding dirt to a tabloid as leverage over him. But how would Scarborough prove that Trump put the Enquirer up to it?

]]>3961883More Scarborough: The White House threatened to blackmail us with a hit piece in the National Enquirer; Update: Kushner?http://hotair.com/archives/2017/06/30/scarborough-white-house-threatened-blackmail-us-hit-piece-national-enquirer/
Fri, 30 Jun 2017 15:21:24 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3961835Extortion.

That’s the most shocking allegation from this morning’s Joe-n-Mika “Donald Trump is not well” op-ed. Well, second-most shocking. Brzezinski admitting she had a chin tuck is the big headline, I think we can all agree.

The president’s unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika “neurotic” and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.

Surprisingly, Trump admits that he talked to Scarborough about an unflattering Enquirer article. What he doesn’t admit is that there was extortion involved:

Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show

Jay Caruso of Red State contacted Scarborough to ask if anyone else besides him and Mika knew of the blackmail threat at the time. Yep, said Scarborough:

“NBC execs knew in real time about the calls and who made them to me. That’s why Mark Kornblau wrote about contemporaneous texts. I showed him and executives as they were coming in to keep them advised.”

Kornblau, a spokesman for NBC, appeared to confirm that in a tweet today. Hmmmm.

Might Scar-zinski have approached Trump to try to get an Enquirer piece quashed, knowing the sort of influence Trump has over that paper? The squabble reminded me of this Daily Beast piece from May about how successful Joe and Mika were at keeping rumors of their relationship out of the papers until this year. A choice anecdote:

In one such case in November 2013, shortly after Scarborough’s divorce from his second wife was finalized (and three years before Brzezinski’s official split from her own spouse), The New York Post’s Richard Johnson was preparing to declare them an item.

According to sources familiar with the situation, a distraught Brzezinski reached out to then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes —like Johnson, a vassal in the Murdoch media empire—and tearfully asked Ailes, with whom she was friendly, to intervene with the gossip columnist, arguing that their respective children would be hurt by such publicity.

If they sought Trump out for help with the Enquirer, it allegedly wouldn’t be the first time they’ve reached out to a prominent right-wing figure to try to pressure a right-wing paper into not publishing a “negative article” about them. On the other hand, knowing how sensitive Joe and Mika were about having their relationship outed, the White House might have been tempted to try to use that as leverage over them to get them to tone down their harsh criticism of Trump. Remember this tweet from last August? Trump knew before the public did that something was going on. And it wouldn’t be the first time either that Team Trump has, seemingly, used the Enquirer to attack a political opponent. It was the Enquirer, after all, that published the hit pieces on Ted Cruz last spring implying that he had had affairs with women in Washington and suggesting that his father Rafael was, uh, somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination. Cruz himself accused Trump of planting those stories. If that’s true, it’s no great stretch to think Team Trump might have threatened to hand the dirt they had on Joe and Mika to the Enquirer unless “Morning Joe” became a Trump cheerleading squad again.

Sean Spicer says he’s not aware of any blackmail threats made against Scarborough and the Enquirer naturally denies everything. Here’s Scar-zinski recounting what happened in their own words. Maybe Joe should have paid closer attention to the lyrics of “The Snake” when Trump was reciting it every day on the campaign trail, back when “Morning Joe” really was something of a Trump cheerleading squad.

Update: The Daily Beast claims that Jared Kushner is one of the White House aides who allegedly spoke to Scarborough about the Enquirer piece. But was it blackmail or just a friendly conversation?

According to these officials, Kushner and Scarborough had spoken “many weeks ago” regarding a then upcoming negative Enquirer article on Scarborough and Brzezinski. Scarborough had “calmly sought” advice from Kushner, who “recommended he speak with the president.”

But White House sources’ accounts of the conversation differed from Scarborough’s description and suggestions of more sinister interactions. No hostile threat or attempt at blackmail was made, according to these officials.

“This is getting blown up on Twitter and elsewhere as some kind of blackmail operation,” one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, said. “The truth is far more mundane. In this case, Joe was talking to Jared about his [bad] relationship with the president and a Enquirer hit piece he was uneasy about.”

Genuine dilemma here for the happy couple. On the one hand, you don’t try to out-troll King Troll. You’ll never win. Ask Marco Rubio. On the other hand, if they’re trying to damage his presidency, the shrewdest thing they could do would be to keep baiting him. Have Mika call him “President Tinywiener” or whatever. He won’t mention health care again for a week.

The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” delayed their vacation plans so they can return to the air Friday morning and fire back at President Trump’s Twitter attack.

“Joe and Mika were supposed to start their July 4th weekend early by taking Friday off — but following Trump’s tweet, they postponed their trip by day so they can be back on air Friday morning to sling some ‘bad blood’ back at Trump,” an MSNBC source told The Post.

That’s from the New York Post, which summed up Trump’s Twitter salvo this morning in a three-word editorial. Speaking of which, some new data from Trump’s favorite network via a poll conducted before he took on Scarborough and Brzezinski. Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on much, but ask them whether they think Trump’s Twitter habit is helping or hurting his agenda and the partisan stars align:

Overall, 46 percent disapprove of his tweeting, 39 percent wish he’d be more “cautious” (good luck), and just 13 percent approve. Bear those numbers in mind the next time a White House aide defends his Twitter habit on grounds that it’s his pipeline to the public, free of the distorting media filter. It could be that if he were more judicious in what he tweeted, but he is who he is. As Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today at the daily briefing, “They knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump.”

]]>3961774“Morning Joe” squeals on Kellyanne Conway: She used to tell us that she hated defending Trumphttp://hotair.com/archives/2017/05/15/morning-joe-squeals-kellyanne-conway-used-tell-us-hated-defending-trump/
Mon, 15 May 2017 19:31:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3955752"She would say, ‘Blech. I need to take a shower.' Because she disliked her candidate so much."

Via the Free Beacon, I hope someday we get the whole story of why “Morning Joe,” especially Mika, seems to hate Conway so, so, so much. This is a piece of the puzzle, but I don’t think we have all the pieces yet.

Any reason to believe this is true? Welllllll… Remember these tweets, from a few weeks before election day?

You don’t often see a campaign manager needling her candidate publicly for his indiscipline. Nor do you hear them describe interacting with their candidate as though he’s a five-year-old with ADHD:

No one understands this better than Manafort’s successors. To hear Kellyanne Conway talk about managing her boss is to listen to a mother of four who has had ample experience with unruly toddlers. Instead of criticizing Trump’s angry tweets, for instance, she suggested that he also include a few positive ones. “You had these people saying, ‘Delete the app! Stop tweeting!’ ” she recalled. “I would say, ‘Here are a couple of cool things we should tweet today.’ It’s like saying to someone, ‘How about having two brownies and not six?’”

Brzezinski and Scarborough are also right that Conway referred to Trump as her “client” towards the end, although how often she did it I don’t know. She did use that term on October 23rd on “Meet the Press.” It seemed obvious enough at the time to Trump-skeptics like me that she had misgivings about Trump that I hoped she’d end up as chief of staff, a voice of reason within the inner circle. That … feels like a long time ago.

What all of the above have in common — the tweets, the New York magazine profile, the MTP appearance — is that they came before election day but after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged, when Trump looked for a few weeks like he was dead in the water politically. It may be that Conway thought the campaign was a lost cause at that point (she conceded on “Meet the Press” that Trump was behind) and was eager to let her friends in the GOP consultant class know that she was a reluctant passenger on the Trump train and would soon be back amongst them as a “respectable Republican.” She began the campaign heading up a pro-Cruz Super PAC, remember, and joined Trump 2016 only in late summer of last year after Paul Manafort was fired. The common thread between the Super PAC and the Trump campaign was the Mercer family. Conway is a longtime advisor to the Mercers; they bankrolled the Cruz PAC that she led. When they swung around to backing Trump, Conway did too. What may have happened is that the Mercers found out Trump was unhappy with Manafort, persuaded him that Conway was an able manager, then leaned on Conway to join Team Trump and try to get him over the finish line. Conway, not wanting to alienate some of her most powerful and wealthiest allies, agreed. She may very well have seen it as little more than a favor she was doing for them, something that would raise her media profile and lock in plenty more Mercer business for years to come. Which, if true, would jibe with Scarborough’s claim here about her “summer vacation.” Then Trump pulled the upset of the century and she woke up to find she had hit the political jackpot.

Assume it’s all true, though. Why are Joe and Mika telling tales out of school like this? Whatever Conway said to them about her reluctance to flack for Trump was doubtless said in confidence. They’re breaching that confidence and seemingly doing it in hopes that Trump will hear this, get pissed off, and fire her. If you’re one of the eight thousand establishment political/media people who frequent this show as guests, why would you ever say another candid thing in Scarborough’s or Brzezinski’s presence? Obviously they’ll try to use it to destroy you, publicly, on their own show, if you end up on their sh*t list. Sheesh.

]]>3955752Day 45: Mika Brzezinski already on the brink of a nervous breakdown over Trumphttp://hotair.com/archives/2017/03/06/day-45-mika-brzezinski-already-on-the-brink-of-a-nervous-breakdown-over-trump/
Mon, 06 Mar 2017 16:21:45 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3946482"Just for the record, we are all really nervous. So if people out there feel nervous, we do too."

At least she can console herself with the fact that she did nothing to promote Trump in the primaries when he was desperate for legitimacy from establishment political media, right?

Gotta say, watching her slow-motion mental break over Trump is compelling television. In hindsight, barring Kellyanne Conway from the show over credibility problems instead of inviting her on and challenging her, as virtually any other “news” program would have done, was probably the first sign. We may be only days away from Brzezinski inevitably walking off the set while on the air, too emotional to continue, because Trump tweeted something new about Obama’s birth certificate or whatever. Question for her and Joe: What did they think they’d be getting in the White House if Trump won, back when they were doing their “he’s really shaking up the system” tapdance routine in 2015? “This is not funny,” Brzezinski intones at one point here. Right. It’s never been funny. When did she finally figure that out?

I give them some credit, though, for not pulling their punches on Trump even after Joe met with him last week before his speech to Congress. It’d be the easiest thing for this show to rebuild its access to the White House by going easy on the president. Instead they’re doing this. The charitable explanation for that is that Scarborough feels obliged to call ’em as he sees ’em, even if it costs him. The less charitable explanation is that Scarborough has more to lose by alienating his many establishment friends if he kisses up to Trump than he does by alienating Trump in attacking him. You can have a show that makes Trump fans happy or you can have a show that makes Mark Halperin fans, such as they are, happy, but not both. Which sort of show has Scarborough spent the past 10 years running?

Don’t be daunted by the number of clips, by the way. The first and last are each very short. I just couldn’t find one video that captured the full breadth of Brzezinski’s performance this morning.

A threshold question: Who besides Trump himself would have the authority to tell a big cheese like Conway to stay off TV for a week? If the answer is “no one,” how likely is it that Trump himself would punish arguably his most effective and loyal surrogate for errors she made in the course of defending him? This is a guy who caused a minor international incident this week because a five-minute bit he saw on Tucker Carlson convinced him that something had happened “last night in Sweden.” He’s not a stickler for accuracy.

Kellyanne Conway, once the most visible spokesperson for the Trump White House, has been sidelined from television appearances for making statements that were at odds with the administration’s official stance, White House sources told CNNMoney on Wednesday.

Conway has not given a television interview since early last week. On that Monday, she claimed that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had the president’s “full confidence.” Hours later, Flynn resigned…

She was “off message,” a White House source said…

“Trump was using her as an effective surrogate, then she started becoming ineffective,” one of the sources said. “So they’re letting the heat cool off.”

If Conway’s “off-message,” maybe that’s because she’s not being included in some of the meetings that would allow her to be more on-message. Whatever the case, Conway herself claims the CNN story is nonsense, that she was simply using the time to “focus on other pieces of my portfolio.” White House spokesmen are also calling BS on CNN:

“Those accusations are completely false,” another White House official told TPM by phone.

“This is just not true,” a third White House official wrote in an email to TPM. “She has several media appearances this week and has been focused on deeply invloved (sic) with the joint session speech this week taking up a lot of her time.”

She has had a rough month. There was the “Bowling Green massacre,” the snafu about Flynn’s status, the impromptu commercial for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, and plenty of criticism from people in cable news insisting that her credibility was so thoroughly shot that she didn’t deserve their airtime. The White House source who allegedly told CNN that she’s gone from being a uniquely effective surrogate to a uniquely ineffective one in short order isn’t wrong. But go back to my question: Who in the White House would have the juice required to bench Conway for a week?

WaPo raises an interesting possibility. As it turns out, Conway’s disappearance from TV this week happened to coincide with the appointment of Mike Dubke, a consultant from the establishment side of the party, as White House communications director. If Dubke had gone to Trump (possibly with Priebus’s and Spicer’s backing) and asked him to sit Conway for a week, Trump might have granted the request as a show of faith in the new guy’s judgment and a vote of confidence in his authority. Another possibility has to do with that letter sent to the White House a few weeks ago by the Office of Government Ethics demanding disciplinary action against Conway for her ethical breach in touting Ivanka’s apparel. Maybe the White House concluded that appropriate discipline in this case was to take Conway off the air for a bit. Although there’s an obvious problem with that theory: It imagines that Trump agrees that Conway really did do something wrong by advertising Ivanka’s merchandise. Anyone seriously believe that?

There’s another problem with the idea that the White House “sidelined” Conway: She did a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt just yesterday. It’s an odd form of disciplinary action that would let her be heard by a large audience but not seen by one, suggesting that the “sidelining” is either exaggerated or never really happened. It may be, though, that Team Trump will limit her to friendly interviewers for awhile to try to reduce the chances of another buzzworthy gaffe. Hewitt is a Republican and whoever hosts her on Fox News tonight is bound to be pro-Trump. She used to be the person the White House favored to do battle with the likes of Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd but maybe it’ll be a diet of Fox and conservative talk radio for her for awhile.

Here’s Scarborough continuing to knife Conway — for at least the third time in two weeks — on Colbert’s show last night. The key bit comes at around a minute in. Exit question: Given the rumors of rivalries and turf wars inside the White House, is it possible that Conway’s gotten some of her facts (most notably on Flynn’s status) wrong because an adversary has been feeding her bad information? If so, you’d expect Trump to have taken action against that person by now, right?

This is at least the third time in eight days that Brzezinski has made a show of her contempt for Conway. The first was on February 6th, when it came out that CNN had declined to have Conway on its Sunday show because of questions about her credibility. Conway claimed on Twitter that in fact she had skipped the Sunday shows that week due to family obligations. CNN replied to that — and so did Brzezinski:

The second swipe at Conway came yesterday when Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough went off on how Conway simply isn’t believable and may literally not know what she’s talking about in commenting on White House affairs. “It’s not worth the interview” to have her on, Brzezinski insisted. Today brought round three, as you’ll see below, with Brzezinski accusing Conway of trying to get herself booked on the show personally, a policy Mika insists will no longer be followed. To be clear, this is a senior advisor to the president offering herself to be grilled about the day’s events and, rather than seizing the opportunity to question her, an ostensible news organization is refusing the chance. Is MSNBC no longer interested in journalism? (I know, I know: “It never was!”)

Either way, they’re not the only media outlet weighing whether to take away Conway’s camera time, notwithstanding the fact that nearly every interview she gives ends up being buzzworthy:

An anchor from a different network said Conway hasn’t been invited on the anchor’s show for months, saying the viewer gets “nothing out of her” because “she constantly obfuscates and misrepresents the truth.”

“At best, Conway is low-hanging spinning fruit, sugary but empty. At worst she’s an apparatchik or, as Carl Bernstein puts it, ‘a propaganda minister.’ Neither is good for the republic,” added the anchor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That’s why I’ve chosen not to have her on.”

Brzezinski’s ban is getting all the attention this morning but it’s Scarborough who delivers the heaviest blow in the clip below, I think. It’s not that Conway’s a liar, he claims. It’s that she’s inconsequential. She claims to speak with deep inside knowledge of White House policymaking when, allegedly, she’s not being regularly included in many meetings of the inner circle (Priebus, Bannon, Kushner). That’s how you end up with her telling reporters that Trump has full confidence in Mike Flynn six hours before Flynn resigns. That idea, that Conway is “out of the loop” inside the White House, was also suggested by this recent Politico piece, which describes her as a “queen without an army … dipping in and out of meetings to offer big-picture communications advice” but lacking the sort of meaty policy position she craves, like chief of staff. Everyone who works in media gets called a liar sometimes; getting called ill-informed because you’re second-tier in your own hierarchy is a much harsher criticism.

But is it true, or is undermining her all part of an ongoing Team Trump turf war? Conway is a Bannon ally so the “out of the loop” stuff likely isn’t coming from his camp. Could it be coming from … Priebus’s camp? Remember, Sean Spicer is a Priebus guy from way back, having served as the RNC’s chief spokesman when Reince led the organization. And allegedly things haven’t been smooth lately between Spicer and Conway:

Five … sources think the person behind the leaks [that Spicer might soon be replaced] is Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s ever-visible White House counselor. Though they offer no hard evidence, they say Conway is trying to offload blame for administration setbacks on Spicer to prove she is the more effective public advocate and earn a lasting place in the President’s inner circle.

“She’s clearly guiding a press narrative that he’s not up for the job, and that they’re reviewing other candidates,” one GOP strategist said. “It’s becoming abundantly clear that Kellyanne is making Sean’s job impossible.”

Publicly, the two appear to be locked in a Cold War, issuing not-so-indirect slights at one another across the airwaves. When Spicer was asked last week about the ethics of Conway promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line from the White House briefing room, his response was curt: “She’s been counseled.”

The following day, after the President showed support for Conway, she tweeted that Trump “likes ‘counselor’ more than ‘counseled.'”

There’s a big problem with that theory, one noted in the story by Conway herself: She was offered the press secretary job before Spicer was and turned it down, so clearly she’s not trying to replace him herself. On the contrary, the whole reason Conway rejected the job, reportedly, was that she wanted some real policy influence, not just communications work. If it’s true that she’s undermining Spicer, maybe it’s a simple matter of disdain for someone who’s not as good at his job as she thinks she would be — or maybe she’s concerned that Spicer will be good at his job and that he’ll replace her in time as Trump’s go-to surrogate. The point, though, is that if you’re looking for ideas on who might be whispering to Scarborough and Brzezinski about Conway’s not-so-significant role in the White House, the Priebus/Spicer camp is one obvious place to start.

One last thing. Are we now in another Trump/Scarborough Cold War? During the campaign Scarborough was chummy with Trump early, then things soured, then suddenly he was advising Trump informally again after the election, and now he and Mika are bombing Conway on the air every day. Just this morning Scarborough slapped Trump hard on Twitter:

1. Hillary's campaign was awful. 2. Your fawning over Putin is awful3. Your trashing of the United States of America for Putin is awful. https://t.co/jfItsTiZib

Trump’s number-one fan, Sean Hannity, has also been taking swipes at Scarborough lately on Twitter, suggesting further alienation of “Morning Joe” from the White House. Stay tuned.

In lieu of an exit question, a prediction: The “ban” on Conway will be lifted soon assuming it ever takes effect at all. That’s not just because MSNBC won’t be happy about ceding access to Conway to its competitors but because the mainstream media knows that Trump will happily seek out new media as a pipeline to the public if the big TV news outlets start denying him one. It won’t just be Fox News who lands Conway interviews if MSNBC and CNN start shutting her out; it’ll be Breitbart and other right-wing online platforms. Big media already has enough to worry about in losing viewers. Giving the White House an excuse to elevate “alternative media” because it can’t get its top people on the air anymore will only make that problem worse.

]]>3943972Scarborough warns Trump: You can’t fight this many battles at oncehttp://hotair.com/archives/2017/01/16/scarborough-warns-trump-you-cant-fight-this-many-battles-at-once/
Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:01:10 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3939728"There is no message discipline and there has to be because it matters."

Via RCP, it’s always fun when Trump’s friends try to advise him through their TV shows, especially when they’re being critical. Er, is there another Friend of Donald in media who uses his or her platform to criticize him? Maybe O’Reilly, very occasionally?

I’m torn between agreeing here and wondering what would have to happen for Trump to conclude “I’m alienating too many people.” What price has he ever paid for counterpunching everyone who’s taken a shot at him? He’s a billionaire who just got elected president. Taking on all comers seems to be working out okay for him. Scarborough’s point is that a politician can’t afford to anger too many different constituencies at once, especially when he’s making high-risk moves on policy. He’s going to need public support, for instance, if/when we end up in a trade war with Germany over the tariffs Trump wants to slap on cars built abroad. Every time he squabbles with a John Lewis or takes some weird shot at U.S. intelligence about Nazi Germany, he risks worrying or pissing off some voter needlessly who might otherwise be in his corner. And it’s not like he’s starting with sky-high approval: Gallup has him at 40/55 today. People are probably suspending their personal misgivings about him for the moment to give him a chance on policy, on the theory — which prevailed on Election Day — that in the end they don’t much care if he’s thin-skinned or corrupt so long as he really does find a way to bring back jobs and make America great again. But because of their misgivings, they may also give him less time to show results than they would a president whom they like better. It’s like any employer/employee relationship. The employee who’s constantly arguing with people is worth keeping so long as he’s bringing in clients, but as soon as business dries up, the knives are out.

Like I say, though: What would have to happen to get Trump to change his behavior and pass on counterattacking the next time someone like Lewis questions his legitimacy? Scarborough imagines his polling falling into the 20s if this keeps up. Would that do it? Because you know what he and his fans are likely to say: “The polls lie,” and even if it’s true that his numbers are momentarily bad, the rebound is right around the corner. There’s no reason to think fading polls would do much to make congressional Republicans tough on him either. Between his popularity among the grassroots right and his willingness to attack his enemies in the media, House and Senate GOPers seem terrified of him. They’re already shrugging off his dubious plan to eliminate his business conflicts of interest so as not to antagonize him. His numbers would need to get awfully bad, perhaps implausibly so, to embolden Ryan and McConnell knowing that the GOP has a favorable map in the midterms and that they’re all but certain to retain their majorities no matter what happens. Besides, the reason congressional Republicans held off on opposing Trump as a candidate isn’t because they feared he’d be hugely popular nationally. They held off because, again, they feared being attacked by him personally and, more importantly, because they knew there are enough diehard Trumpers out there within the GOP to destroy the party’s chances if they boycotted an election en masse over how the party has treated him. That’s why Trump wasn’t deposed at the convention last year. Even if 85 percent of the party’s voters could have been convinced to support a replacement nominee, having that last 15 percent stay home in anger would have guaranteed defeat. They made the calculation that they were better off holding on to those 15 percent by keeping Trump as nominee in the hope that the other 85 percent would tolerate him. And they were right.

It’ll be the same dynamic two years from now. Even if he alienates everyone and his approval is at 27 percent, that 27 percent will represent a giant chunk of the Republican base. If you’re Paul Ryan and you’re weighing whether to oppose Trump on a major policy initiative, like infrastructure, what’s the bigger gamble? That angry Trump fans will stay home if you screw their leader by tanking one of his big projects in the House or that the rest of the party will stay home if you sign off on his plan and hope for the best? Realistically, either Trump’s policies will work out well enough and the party will head into the midterms in decent shape — here’s hoping — or things will go south and the party will stick by him anyway in the tremulous expectation that the map will protect them in 2018. Only if they suffer actual losses that November will he change his M.O. Maybe.

In lieu of an exit question, read this piece at the Daily Wire about why huge tariffs on German cars … might not work out so well.

The cohosts are now in regular communication with Trump and his circle — so much so that they are fielding criticism for being a house organ for the incoming administration.

“They have always been boosters. Things turned south when trump froze them out but coverage always stilted. They are transition spokesmen now,” tweeted a rival morning anchor, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, on Tuesday. (Cuomo declined to comment further.)…

Scarborough, in an interview, declared that he and Brzezinski talk several times a week with Trump himself. And last week, Brzezinski traveled to Trump Tower and visited Ivanka Trump for coffee.

Papers have been reporting since the week after the election that Trump now “often” seeks out Scarborough for advice. That being so, he has no reason to BS Scarborough on his thinking by giving him false scoops — unless the Romney chatter really has been a long con to get Mitt’s hopes up before yanking the football away and Scarborough is in on it. At this point, that feels almost like a “Westworld” theory: Is William the Man in Black or someone else? Is Bernard human or a robot? Is Trump preparing to make Romney his chief diplomat or to pants him by declaring in the end that he was never really under consideration?

I’m surprised John Bolton hasn’t figured more prominently in the chatter lately. Eli Lake made the case for him yesterday. He has State Department experience, he had some important accomplishments on arms control during Dubya’s first term, and he’s simpatico with Trump (well, maybe not vis-a-vis Russia) on standing up to American adversaries:

Bolton also takes a hard line with rogue states. He was one of the most ardent opponents of Bill Clinton’s nuclear agreement with North Korea. After Trump’s electoral victory this month, Bolton called for regime change in Iran and said he hoped Trump would abrogate the nuclear deal with that regime.

Needless to say, Secretary of State Bolton would represent a sea change for U.S. foreign policy. The man who currently heads the State Department, John Kerry, is in temperament and ideology Bolton’s opposite. Kerry has bent over backwards to meet America’s adversaries halfway, whether it’s in talks with Russia over Syria, or the negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal.

But it’s worth asking what the Kerry approach has gotten us. As he finishes up his tenure, Iran tests missiles, arrests Americans and still demands new concessions from the U.S. China builds artificial islands in the South China Sea. And Russia continues to bomb civilians in Syria. Meanwhile, the Israelis and Palestinians are further away from a negotiated settlement than they were when Obama took office.

Bolton wrote an op-ed in January of this year encouraging the U.S. to use Taiwan as a lever to compel Chinese cooperation. Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s president signals a shift towards that strategy. Unsurprisingly, Bolton was back on TV this week applauding Trump’s decision to hold that call. Bolton’s not a nation-building neoconservative either, although he is hawkish. He and Trump would seem to be a good fit — again, with the possible and important exception of Russia and NATO. He could run into confirmation problems given Rand Paul’s opposition, but I’ll bet Trump could peel off a few Manchin-style Democrats to get him over the hump. I wouldn’t count him out.

Scarborough and, especially, Brzezinski seem to like the idea of Bob Gates as a dark horse, though. I do too. I haven’t heard him mentioned anywhere as a contender, only someone whose advice Trump has sought, but it sounds like maybe the two are whispering to Trump about him. They should keep it up.

Ed already mentioned this morning’s Twitter nastiness but I’m going to take the opposite line on it. Sure, Trump is a moron for handing the media a shiny object on a day when he should be focused like a laser on Clinton Foundation sleaziness, but try to look at it from his perspective. Obviously, this is what he wants to do with his time. Deep down, believe it or not, I feel some sympathy for his predicament. Over and over, no matter how many Paul Manaforts or Reince Priebuses shriek at him to stay on message, he’s been seduced into petty score-settling with media enemies like Scarborough and Megyn Kelly. It must be so confusing to him, having won the primaries by indulging his instincts towards inane insults, to hear now from the political pros he beat that the’s wrecking his chances at winning another election by refusing to change. Why not just let him do what he wants to do? What’s the harm? That was the point of Bannon joining the team, I thought. From now on, Trump would be allowed to do the things that make him happy and his fans would dutifully cheer him on and call him a genius. He’d lose badly in November, but that’s okay: He’d spin it as the product of a rigged election and many of his supporters would believe him, and then he’d go off and found Trump News for them. Everybody wins except the GOP, but screw the GOP. All of this was foreseeable when they rubber-stamped him as the nominee after he knocked Cruz out in Indiana. They bought the ticket, now they can take the ride.

So let Trump be Trump. He’s a born entertainer. Sit back, stop worrying about elections, and enjoy the show.

Tried watching low-rated @Morning_Joe this morning, unwatchable! @morningmika is off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!

Brzezinski went after Trump pretty hard this morning for his “what do you have to lose?” outreach to black voters, which may or may not have been the catalyst for him to start throwing roundhouses at Joe. His relationship with Scarborough’s show, in fact, may end up being a microcosm of his relationship with the GOP in that it started off neutral, blossomed into outright support, and predictably has disintegrated into vicious attacks as Joe and Mika have grown more wary about him becoming president. What sort of “real stories” about Reince and the RNC will Trump start telling on the stump in October if he’s eight points behind and the GOP cuts off his money? Or maybe that’s the point of this broadside at Scarborough, to implicitly warn other frenemies who are thinking of crossing Trump that he’s prepared to play nasty if they do.

Hopefully Sean Hannity can find five minutes on tonight’s show amid his ranting about how #NeverTrumpers are putting the Supreme Court in jeopardy to ponder whether Trump values the fate of the Court more than, say, his latest Twitter flame war. Speaking of which, the NYT cites multiple sources today who claim that Hannity has been informally advising Trump “for months” and may be angling for a job in the Trump administration, although Hannity denies the latter. “I never claimed to be a journalist,” he said to the charges of giving Trump advice, which is true — but it’s also true that employees of a news organization, whether “objective” or not, aren’t supposed to try to quietly influence the events the organization is reporting on without disclosing that. Then again, don’t you think Scarborough quietly gave Trump a pointer or two on campaigning this past spring when they were still buddies? Isn’t it highly likely that Hannity’s former boss, Roger Ailes, had a chat or two with Trump over the past 15 months when he was still running Fox in which he offered friendly advice on the primaries? People who work for news outlets shouldn’t be secretly trying to shape the news itself but none of us are so naive as to believe it doesn’t happen among major players. Two follow-up questions, though. One: Was Hannity advising Trump during the primaries? Because he swore up and down at the time, however implausibly, that he was neutral and wanted merely to give each candidate a chance to be heard. If he was whispering in Trump’s ear but not Ted Cruz’s, then his neutrality claim was untrue. And two: Did he ever secretly advise Trump on how to handle his running war on Megyn Kelly? Some might call that a conflict of interest.

Via RCP, something fun in honor of Scarborough’s op-ed in WaPo today calling on the GOP to dump Trump. Can it be that we’ve already reached the stage of decline in Trumpmania where some of Trump’s boosters in the media feel obliged to claim they were never boosters at all? It’s August 10th. This sort of revisionist history isn’t supposed to begin until after the debates at the earliest. This ship isn’t sinking so quickly that the passengers have to run for the lifeboats already, is it?

I’m not a Trump supporter, Scarborough insists, because I never endorsed him. I backed Jeb Bush, then Kasich. And I criticized Trump sharply at times, like when he first proposed his worldwide ban on Muslims visiting the United States. Fair enough — that’s one part of this story. But Peter King’s not pulling the idea of Scarborough being sweet on Trump out of thin air. Remember this, from February?

[A]t NBCUniversal’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center, Scarborough’s relationship with the Republican presidential frontrunner has become a subject of frustration among staff, and an increasingly problematic issue for the network’s top brass.

In background discussions, NBC News and MSNBC journalists, reporters and staffers said there was widespread discomfort at the network over Scarborough’s friendship with Trump and his increasingly favorable coverage of the candidate.

“People don’t like that Joe is promoting Trump,” one MSNBC insider said. Others described Scarborough’s admiration for Trump as “over the top” and “unseemly.”

Scarborough objected to the sourcing on that story at the time but CNN stuck by its reporting. The morning after Trump’s big win in New Hampshire, Trump told Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in an interview, “It was great seeing you, and you guys have been supporters and I really appreciate it” before catching himself and saying, “Not necessarily supporters, but at least believers.” A week later, they hosted him in a townhall event that became infamous not just for its sycophancy but because hot mic audio emerged afterward of Trump marveling at how they had treated him as “almost like a legendary figure” in one segment of their morning show. “Just make us all look good” and “Nothing too hard, Mika,” he said to them during the townhall, with no dissent. Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik had attacked the townhall even before it happened for being an obvious quid pro quo, in his opinion, between a candidate and two hosts who had been “shilling” for him for months. The title of Zurawik’s column: “Trump to do town hall with his favorite media poodle.” After the event, Matt Taibbi took to describing Scarborough’s treatment of Trump as “Morning Blow.”

At some point thereafter, things went sour. By May, media outlets were reporting on a “feud” between Scarborough and Trump. Even so, as late as mid-April, with Ted Cruz trying to capitalize on his big win in Wisconsin to mount a comeback in the primaries, Scarborough was still helping Trump out by arguing implausibly that Cruz would be a bigger drag on Republican Senate candidates than Trump would. It’s true that Scarborough laid into him at times during the primaries, even declaring after Trump’s lame dodging of questions about David Duke in late February that his comments were “disqualifying” for a presidential contender. And yet this supposedly disqualified candidate was still invited back to “Morning Joe” for commentary many times thereafter, phoning into the show in late May despite reports of a “feud” having already appeared in the media. In late January, just a few days before Iowa went to caucus, Scarborough even refused to rule out becoming Trump’s VP when Hugh Hewitt asked him about it, with Joe theorizing that he had a patriotic duty to do anything that might help break the Democratic stranglehold on government.

So choose your own term: If it’s unfair to describe Morning Joe as a “supporter” because he never formally endorsed, surely “enabler” isn’t too strong a description. And surely we can agree that a pro forma endorsement of Trump by Scarborough wouldn’t have been nearly as valuable to Trump as the many chummy appearances Trump enjoyed on Joe’s show sans formal endorsement between June 2015 and May 2016. Trump’s primary strategy was all about earned media; he was going to beat the professional pols and their fancy ground games by reaching Republican voters directly, with ubiquitous media coverage. Scarborough played his part and then some, even after he’d deemed Trump unfit for office, but rather than own it he’s taking an attitude with Peter King here for having an inconveniently long memory. Oh well. Gonna be a lot of this from a lot of people in media if the trajectory of the race doesn’t change. Although Hannity at least will probably wait until after Election Day to start revising.

]]>3917436Scarborough: Trump kept asking during a foreign policy briefing why can’t we use nuclear weaponshttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/08/03/scarborough-trump-kept-asking-during-a-foreign-policy-briefing-why-cant-we-use-nuclear-weapons/
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:21:32 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3916224"Three times he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?'”

So the current guy wants to pay terrorists for taking hostages and the next guy is open to dropping the bomb? Good work, America. This discerning “elect the polar opposite on foreign policy of whomever we last elected” strategy is paying big dividends.

Team Trump naturally denies that he ever said any such thing (fans will presumably split into the usual camps of “Trump never said that” and “Trump is right”) but lefty Judd Legum made an interesting catch from a Trump interview with Chris Matthews in April:

TRUMP: Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used, possibly, possibly?

MATTHEWS: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them? We had (inaudible).

That last line is almost verbatim what Scarborough accuses him of saying in the briefing, per his source: “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” It’s not that Trump is eager to use them; read the full Matthews transcript and you’ll see him emphasizing that he would be “very, very slow and hesitant to pull that trigger.” The question is, does he see nukes purely as a deterrent, to be used only in retaliation or other extreme circumstances? Or does he see them as part of the conventional U.S. military arsenal, albeit as the least favored weapon? In other words, is the choice in Syria against ISIS between an air campaign and an air and ground campaign? Or is it between those two plus a third option of wiping Raqaa off the map and incinerating the taboo on nuclear weapons in modern warfare in the process? It’s one thing to talk tough publicly about sand glowing in the dark, as Ted Cruz did last fall. But Scarborough’s not accusing Trump of posturing for votes. He’s accusing him of asking about this earnestly, in private,

It’s strange to think of Vladimir Putin favoring someone for president of the United States who might have an itchy finger on the nuclear trigger but John Schindler explains his comfort level well. They share an outlook, and that outlook doesn’t involve clashes between great powers.

The ancients had a take on foreign relations that was memorably expressed as “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This law of the jungle led to countless wars right until the mid-20th century, when the appalling cost of letting aggressors simply do as they wished became obvious to all but the blind.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision, with its desire to please dictators until they hopefully behave, seems to be more comfortable with the norms of the ancients than with those of the current century. This is why Crimea matters. Trump’s concept of international relations will only encourage more aggression against the weak while quite possibly unleashing major war and geopolitical hell with it.

So long as American nuclear weapons aren’t being used to damage Russian interests, their use — or even their threatened use — would be a gift to Putin in handing him a precedent to cite in wielding his own nuclear saber more aggressively. And as a bonus, the more erratic American shows of power become, the greater the incentive for lesser powers to decide that, between the two, Putin is the more stable, reliable ally. But then, we’ve already crossed that bridge with Trump’s NATO comments. If you’re a foreign leader who’s worried about what a Trump administration would mean for your country, you were worried about it before Scarborough started whispering about Trump’s freer hand with nukes. Which reminds me: Trump has already suggested openly this year that one way U.S. allies like Japan might do more to support their own defense is to … acquire nuclear weapons. The fact that he would be that indifferent to global proliferation supports the possibility that he’d also be less strict about using America’s arsenal.

A question in closing. Scarborough said this happened “several months ago.” Even if you don’t think what Trump allegedly said is a big deal, Scarborough himself clearly does. In which case, why is he only mentioning it for the first time today? Did he find out about it only recently, or has he been holding onto it for months but kept it close to the vest because Trump was a chummy regular guest on “Morning Joe” for most of the year before turning on Scarborough? If you have to reason to believe that Trump might start a nuclear war, you might not want to condition this revelation on access to the candidate.

]]>3916224Report: Rubio lobbied to be Trump’s VP, but has now been ruled outhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/05/06/report-rubio-lobbied-to-be-trumps-vp-but-has-now-been-ruled-out/
Fri, 06 May 2016 22:01:26 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3904197Heh.

I don’t buy it, but just the thought of how gut-wrenching the possibility must be to Rubio’s fans tickles me enough to write it up. This is the beauty of being a Cruz fan — you know he’s cynical. He can’t let you down too badly because you’re aware going in that Cruz is looking out for number one. I’ll be mad when he inevitably endorses Trump and will write an angry post or two when he gives the big “unity!” speech at the convention, but I’m already in the process of making peace with both outcomes because I expect them. Rubio fans, though, view their guy as nobler than petty politics. He’s the true anti-Trump, preaching optimism and inclusiveness when he’s not making jokes about the size of Trump’s hands. He’s Bambi. And Bambi would never form a ticket with a Godzilla-ish demagogue like Trump. Or would he?

Nah, he wouldn’t. For one simple reason: If he did, Democrats would spend the next six months running clips of Rubio tearing into Trump every which way on the trail this past year. They’d do major ads composed of nothing but Marco soundbites stitched together. Every ticket formed by two candidates can be attacked that way, since the VP invariably has said something unkind about the nominee at some point in the process (Carly Fiorina once accused Cruz of saying anything to get elected). But voters are willing to dismiss that stuff as garden-variety political attacks designed for advantage. Calling your running mate a “con artist” who’s unfit to lead the party of Lincoln and Reagan is an order of magnitude different. Rubio will have enough trouble reconciling those comments with his role as a minor endorser of Trump’s as to make the thought of him as VP unimaginable.

In the past several weeks, Rubio was quietly “lobbying for the job,” two sources told Newsmax…

With no convention floor fight now expected, Trump’s high command decided that Rubio “would not be a good fit” for several reasons.

Rubio would likely not woo Hispanic-American voters in large numbers. Rubio also lost his home state primary by a large margin to Trump, creating doubt that Rubio would help Trump carry Florida…

Trump also feels the junior Florida senator doesn’t have the experience he wants to see in his vice president, credentials that might offset Hillary Clinton’s likely charge that Trump is not knowledgeable enough about the federal government.

Can you imagine how Trump fans would react to him picking Captain Amnesty as his right-hand man? Even so, apparently a few delegates from Louisiana who are pledged to Rubio sent a letter to Trump asking him to consider their guy for VP. And then there’s that mysterious NYT report yesterday about “multiple phone conversations” happening lately between Trump and Rubio. If Rubio’s out of the running for VP, what could that be about? I assume it has to do with Trump asking him for fundraising help and some joint appearances in Florida aimed at cutting into Hillary’s margins with Latino voters. We’ll see how big Rubio’s role in the campaign ends up being, but it’s worth noting that Trump apparently complimented him at his rally today before throwing some jabs at #NeverTrumpers like Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. That’s a fine legacy for Rubio’s Senate career. “A lot like Lindsey Graham, except more pro-Trump.”

Speaking of VP candidates who are no longer in the running, how on earth did this slapfight happen? A Trump/Scarborough punch-up is as unlikely as Hannity asking Trump a challenging question.

Joe Scarborough initially endorsed Jeb Bush and Jeb crashed, then John Kasich and that didn't work. Not much power or insight!

Is … this what set Trump off? Good lord. How many times does he need to see a formerly critical big-name Republican capitulate to him before he realizes their criticism is always insincere? The way this bromance has gone over the past year, Scarborough may well end up casting an early vote for Trump on air.

]]>3904197Scarborough: Ted Cruz would do more damage to congressional Republicans on the ballot this fall than Trump wouldhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/14/scarborough-ted-cruz-would-do-more-damage-to-congressional-republicans-on-the-ballot-this-fall-than-trump-would/
Thu, 14 Apr 2016 19:21:07 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3901124"Ted Cruz means Kelly Ayotte is a former United States Senator."

Via Newsbusters, I don’t know what he’s basing this on. True, that NBC/SurveyMonkey poll this week did show Trump a few points better than Cruz against Hillary and Morning Consult’s 50-state poll had Trump winning four more electoral votes against her than Cruz would. Both of those polls, though, fly in the face of most other national surveys. On March 8th, RCP’s average of head-to-head match-ups between Clinton and Trump had him trailing her by four points; a month later, he trails by 10.4. Cruz has slipped a bit too over the same period, but he’s still within striking distance: He led Clinton head to head on March 8th by 1.5 points and now trails by 2.8. In the last major national poll testing him against Hillary (from Marist/McClatchy), he managed to tie her at 47 apiece. Trump trailed by nine.

If you want more current data, you’re in luck. WaPo/ABC are out with a new national poll today confirming that lots of Americans dislike Cruz but many more dislike Trump. And the ones who dislike Trump tend to dislike him strongly.

Thirty-one percent of Americans have a favorable view of Trump while 67 percent are unfavorable — nearly identical to an early March Post-ABC poll which found he would be the most disliked major-party nominee since at least 1984. Over half the public (53 percent) continues to see Trump in a “strongly unfavorable” light, ticking down from 56 percent last month…

Trump also continues to receive strongly negative ratings among several key voting blocs that are at least partly up for grabs this year. Two-thirds of political independents have an unfavorable view of Trump, as do 74 percent of Americans under age 40; 75 percent of women, and 81 percent of Hispanics. Majorities in each group see Trump in a “strongly unfavorable” light, exceeding intense negative ratings of Cruz or Kasich by at least 20 points.

Should those ratings fail to improve, Trump’s potential path to victory rides on a surge in support and turnout among whites, particularly those without college degrees. Yet Trump’s image among both groups is underwater. Whites see him negatively by a 59 to 39 percent margin, while non-college whites tilt negative by a narrower 52 to 45 percent.

Cruz’s numbers are also poor at 36/53 favorability, although he’s 20 points lower than Trump is among voters who view them “strongly unfavorably.” Per ABC, Trump’s overall rating of 67 percent unfavorable is the worst they’ve measured for any presidential candidate since 1984, with one exception. That exception: David Duke, who was barely worse than Trump at 69 percent. This is the guy whom Scarborough thinks is a better shot than Cruz to save some Republican Senate seats.

The logic here is this, I take it: Cruz can’t play in purple states because he’s a doctrinaire conservative whereas Trump is a “radical centrist” with some crossover appeal thanks to his strength among working-class independents and Democrats. (Hypothetical strength, I mean. As noted above, the actual numbers don’t bear this out.) It’s understandable that Scarborough, a centrist himself, would subscribe to the “right-wingers can’t win general elections” theory but using Trump and Cruz as an illustration of that is dubious in two different ways. First, there’s no actual evidence (yet) that Trump would play better in purple states than the more dogmatic Cruz. A Quinnipiac poll of Pennsylvania taken last week had Trump trailing Hillary by three but Cruz tied with her at 43. An Ohio poll taken in mid-March had Trump trailing by six — and Cruz ahead by two. The last poll of Virginia had Cruz trailing by eight and Trump trailing by nine. And in Wisconsin, where Cruz thumped Trump in the primary, he’s within three of Clinton in the latest poll while Trump trails by 10. I think it’s true that a generic populist Republican with protectionist leanings would do much better in swing states than Cruz would, but we don’t have a generic candidate in that niche. We have the opposite, a guy who’s roughly as popular as a famous Klansman was when he ran.

Which brings us to the other flaw in Scarborough’s theory. Trump is so deeply unpopular that he might make red states vulnerable to Hillary, which would offset his hypothetical gains in purple states. This is a guy, remember, who’s neck and neck with her according to some polls in Utah and Mississippi. If that polling is borne out this fall, he’d have to decide whether to (a) spend resources defending those states, which will limit the resources available to him in purple states, or (b) ignore those states, hoping and trusting that they’ll stay loyal while Democrats pour money into them. And that assumes that Trump’s weakness in places like Mississippi wouldn’t show up in more competitive states like Ohio, which it almost certainly would. For someone like Kelly Ayotte, the key difference between Cruz and Trump, I think, is sheer predictability. With Cruz you know what you’re getting, you can tailor your message accordingly, and you can trust that he’s not going to say or do something off the wall that dominates the news for a week and which you’re made to answer for. With Trump, every day brings new “WTF” possibilities. In fact, wasn’t it, er, Joe Scarborough who pronounced Trump “disqualified” from office a few months ago out of disgust when Trump wouldn’t give Jake Tapper a straight answer about Duke and the KKK on one of the Sunday shows? That’s the risk you run with him as nominee. You never know when he’ll do something to evoke that same response in swing voters.

Bottom line: The choice for Ayotte is between someone at the top of the ticket who’s superbly organized, politically familiar, and sure to have party regulars turning out for him en masse and someone whose campaign is famously disorganized, whose political positions in the general are a black box right now, and whose support is unknown beyond the minority of Trumpist Republicans who are fiercely loyal to him. With whom would you rather take your chances?

Via RCP, I … think Ron Fournier’s describing the rule that is, not the rule that should be. That is, he’s not saying it’s a good thing that high-ranking politicians operate according to a different legal standard. He’s just saying them’s the facts. And he’s right. “It’s Soviet-esque,” said Dan Foster, “that we all kind of know that Hillary will never face any consequences and we can only kinda grimly make jokes about it.” Why blame Fournier for our Soviet system?

But wait, is he saying that there should be a double standard for politicians? Huh:

I do understand that when somebody is running for president, there is a higher bar that you have to get over because we can’t have a system in which we are constantly charging people who are running for president of crimes.

He says that as though someone on the Bernie campaign had accused Hillary of shoplifting or something. We’re talking about a major national security breach in which classified information was placed on an unsecured server, indisputably. What’s the risk that presidential candidates are going to be “constantly” charged of crimes like that going forward if Her Majesty is held to the same standard of evidence to trigger a prosecution as any non-royal might be?

Good point by Jim Geraghty too. Where was this higher bar for national candidates when Rick Perry got slapped with BS charges?

Fournier conveniently forgets that “we” already are charging people who are running for president of crimes, based on sheer partisan animosity and desire to generate embarrassing headlines. A partisan, runaway prosecutor indicted Rick Perry on nonsense charges, charges that the court of appeals dismissed and ruled were a violation of Perry’s First Amendment rights and powers as governor. In Wisconsin, a hyper-partisan district attorney and his special prosecutor targeted everyone they could find connected to Scott Walker and launched a multi-county criminal investigation of First Amendment–protected speech.

Show of hands: Who thinks Hillary would be charged even if she wasn’t a candidate this year? The reason she’s above the law isn’t because she’s running for president; if anything, it’s more the case that she’s running for president because she’s above the law, because the web of influence she and Bill have spun over 25 years in Washington protects them from the consequences of behavior that would damage less elite members of the political class like David Petraeus. She was always going to skate on these charges. There’ll simply be more cheers under the current circumstances from Democrats, who are wholly invested in her electoral viability, when she does.

Last chance for the candidates to speak to a biggish TV audience at length before South Carolina votes, unless of course you’re Donald Trump and can dial in to “Morning Joe” on any day ending in “Y” to ramble for an hour about whatever’s on your mind. Coincidentally, Trump is getting his own candidate forum tonight on MSNBC hosted by — ta da — Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. How strange that the liberal cable network would give Trump a free hour at the same time that the two most conservative candidates in the field are set to be interviewed on CNN.

The CNN forum, incidentally, is a two-night event. Cruz, Rubio, and Ben Carson will go tonight from 8-9:30 p.m. ET; tomorrow night it’s Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Trump. It’s not a debate, just a Q&A with each of the candidates in sequence, but given the hostility lately between Cruz and Rubio it’ll probably operate as a sort of debate. That’s one thing to watch tonight: Do they go after each other or focus on tearing down Trump? I don’t think my heart can take a full hour of each of them whining about how the other’s distorting his record. On the other hand, each has some good news to tout if they want to keep things positive. Cruz has the shocking new poll from the WSJ/NBC showing him up two points on Trump nationally (a separate post on that is coming) and Rubio, of course, has the Nikki Haley endorsement. Here’s what that looked like this evening in South Carolina when she finally made it official, followed by Cruz’s new attack ad on Rubio in South Carolina. Given what she’s had to say about “amnesty” recently, Haley herself should enjoy it.

You can chalk this up to Scarborough’s weird grudge against Rubio if you like, but he’s asked this question about Hillary Clinton too and, er … it happens to be a fair cop. What is the big Rubio accomplishment that qualifies him to be president? The closest thing he has to an “achievement” is the Gang of Eight bill, which is like saying that Hillary’s big achievement as Secretary of State was reducing Libya to anarchy. The bill didn’t even pass, leaving Rubio with nothing to point to for his efforts except conservative rage. This is the guy we’re going to put in charge of outfoxing the Democrats nationally, Chuck Schumer’s junior partner on Amnesty 2.0?

It’s amazing that Santorum’s unprepared for this question given that Bush and Christie have been hammering Rubio for his lack of experience for weeks. It’s the first point in the case against him. He could have said, “Take it from me, it’s difficult as a senator to get bills passed, especially as a freshman. Should we rule out legislators categorically from the presidency because they’re unlikely to have silver-bullet ‘accomplishments’ there? I like his agenda and want to give him a better chance to enact it.” Or he could have rejected the premise of the question and argued that a candidate’s CV is just one item in a basket of factors a voter considers when voting for president — intelligence, likability, electability, organizational skill, and so on. In my opinion, Santorum could have said, Rubio’s basket is fuller than everyone else’s. If he wanted to get really cute, he could have channeled the messianism that some Rubio fans feel for their candidate and thrown this back at him: What was Lincoln’s big “accomplishment” before he got elected president? You vote for a man, not for his resume.

Mike Murphy, who leads Jeb Bush’s Super PAC Death Star, is making this argument today too, although characteristically poorly:

https://twitter.com/murphymike/status/695268407998959616

It’s one thing to say, accurately, that Rubio is a lot like Obama in lacking major accomplishments, it’s another thing to say he’s unelectable because of that after Obama won two national elections going away. Was Murphy in a coma from 2008 through 2012? Moreover, since when does Hillary Clinton, of all people, win a battle of the CVs with anyone? As noted, Scarborough’s own program has had fun in the past highlighting how, for someone who’s spent the last 25 years in positions of power in Washington, she has shockingly little to point to as proof of how she’s made things better for her constituents. Who’s worse, the freshman senator who hasn’t passed a major bill or the First Lady turned Senate two-termer turned Secretary of State who, to this day, tends to fall back on how many miles she flew in diplomatic travel when asked what her big achievements were?

One other weird thing about Murphy’s tweet: Jeb Bush was a fan of the Gang of Eight and undoubtedly would have considered it a major accomplishment had the bill passed. Rubio helped get it through the Senate, no small feat in an age of gridlock. He did his part and risked his viability in a national primary in doing so, which should be worth something if you’re an amnesty fan. Not to Jeb, oddly enough. Relatedly, I’ve heard Rubio critics online say lately that if he had skipped the Gang of Eight and voted no with Cruz, he’d already be the runaway frontrunner in the Republican presidential race, which may be true on the theory that he’d win a straight-up personality contest with Cruz if their records in the Senate were more or less identical. I’m not so sure, though. Cruz would still be Cruz, and Rubio wouldn’t be an establishment favorite to the degree he is now if he had tried to sink the GOP’s latest big push on immigration in 2013. He might have struggled for major donors, and that might have weakened him too much early for him to be viable now. In fact, it’s worth considering another counterfactual: What if Boehner had bit the bullet and passed the Gang of Eight bill, which he surely had the votes to do? Rubio would have been the darling of the donor class, the “tea-party senator” who helped grant the establishment one of its greatest political wishes. He’d be such a star among big money that Jeb might not have gotten in after all, leaving Rubio a strong frontrunner on the center-right. Grassroots righties would have despised him, but then many on the right despise him now anyway. Plus, with the Gang of Eight bill in effect, he’d have some security improvements to point to as proof that the bill was a good compromise, which would have placated some border hawks. It’s unquestionable that the Gang of Eight debacle hurt him badly on the right, but it’s highly questionable, I think, that it damaged his presidential chances more than lining up with Cruz against the bill would have done.

Lot of this going around lately. Lindsey Graham told a New Hampshire TV affiliate last week that he’s liable to “oversleep” on election day 2016 if Republicans nominate Trump. Now here’s Reid Ribble (Update:Right Wisconsin had it first) insisting that not only won’t he vote for Trump, other Republicans on Capitol Hill have told him they won’t either. Quietly, I should say — they told him that quietly. Saying it loudly where others might hear is apt to have bad consequences for the party. Right, Jeff Flake?

Two things here. One: I could easily find you “dozens and dozens” of Republicans on Twitter who won’t vote for Marco Rubio if he’s the nominee because he sold them out by backing a terrible immigration bill. There are probably fewer Republicans who would balk at Rubio than would balk at Trump — Rubio’s a conservative with a few liberal exceptions whereas Trump’s a liberal with a few conservative exceptions — but let’s not pretend like the donor class’s dreamboat is acceptable to everyone either. Two: Most of these people are lying, whether they know it or not. Primaries are always full of “I won’t vote for X if he’s nominated” blather because each guy’s voters are invested in him and as divisions sharpen up, that investment can turn bitter. Plenty of Romney-haters swore they’d never vote for a man who paved the way for ObamaCare by passing RomneyCare in Massachusetts only to grudgingly pull the lever for him anyway in 2012 because, as usual, even a bad Republican is better than a Democrat. Most Rubio-haters would end up the same way after six months of Hillary propaganda demagoging them as racist and sexist for their political beliefs. (How many Rubio-haters voted for McCain in 2008 despite his much longer record pushing amnesty?)

The conservative anti-Trump contingent might be different, though, because Trump himself is so different. Weighing Rubio versus Hillary means deciding between a guy who’d govern conservatively and agree to an amnesty with some new enforcement measures against a woman who’d govern liberally and agree to a mega-amnesty whether there’s security attached or not. Even if you hate Rubio, that’s an easy call. Weighing Trump against Hillary is harder because there’s reason to think he’d govern from the center-left economically and, to the extent that he veered right, that it might be mostly on occasional showy panders like a Muslim travel ban that wouldn’t actually do anything to stop terrorism (and might not even last long depending upon how much heat he took for it). Unlike Cruz or Rubio, Trump as president could redefine what it means to be a Republican, to the exclusion of conservatism, for a generation. If you vote for him over Hillary, you’re accepting that risk in return for no real assurances of what you’re getting policy-wise or even whether it’ll be substantially more right-wing than what Hillary’s offering. This is why I’m skeptical of the “lifelong Republicans” who are telling Joe Scarborough that they won’t vote for Trump or Ted Cruz. Those two are night and day. You can think Cruz is charmless and that his populist mien is phony while also believing he’s a good conservative. He’s a known quantity politically, like him or not. He’s unquestionably worth supporting as nominee over Hillary.

But so will Trump be to most GOPers if he’s the nominee. I think the absolute floor for a major party candidate in a general election in our polarized age is around 45 percent. Trump could spend the summer and fall on the trail next year farting into his microphone for fun and he’d probably do no worse than lose to Hillary by 10 points, around the same margin that McCain did in 2008. You can actually get a glimpse of this in his polling among Latinos: As bad as his favorable ratings among that group tend to be in most polls, I don’t think I’ve seen one yet showing him doing worse head to head against Hillary among Latinos than Romney did against Obama in 2012. Romney appears to have reached the absolute floor with that group which Trump, for all the media heavy breathing about “Mexican rapists” and mass deportation, can’t break through. In fact, here’s what Monmouth found today when it asked Republicans how they’ll feel if Trump is nominee:

The “dissatisfieds” will all come around and even many of the “upsets” will ultimately be swayed by a year’s worth of partisan politics. Besides, one virtue of Trump’s centrism and yuuuuge charisma gap with Hillary is that he’ll pick off a few Democrats too to offset the lost Republicans. He’ll still lose, probably badly, but the age of 20-point blowouts in presidential races is over — partly because the phenomenon of “I won’t vote for X as nominee” among partisans is largely over too.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/14/gop-rep-reid-ribble-dozens-and-dozens-of-republicans-have-told-me-they-wont-vote-for-trump-if-hes-the-nominee/feed/3733887292Scarborough: Why isn’t Hillary’s comparison of pro-life Republicans to terrorists a bigger deal in the media?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/28/scarborough-why-isnt-hillarys-comparison-of-pro-life-republicans-to-terrorists-a-bigger-deal-in-the-media/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/28/scarborough-why-isnt-hillarys-comparison-of-pro-life-republicans-to-terrorists-a-bigger-deal-in-the-media/#commentsFri, 28 Aug 2015 15:21:43 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3875183"If a Republican did this, the world would come to a halt."

The simplest explanation is undoubtedly the correct one: When you’re a Democrat and a woman who also happens to represent the best chance of abortion warriors to control the White House for four more years, you simply can’t be too nasty to social conservatives on matters of “choice.” She could run ads photoshopping Marco Rubio into one of those ISIS death-porn videos and the most you’d get out of the wider media is, “Some might consider that offensive.” Interestingly, though, even in conservative media, this hasn’t registered as a truly major story. Our own post on it yesterday drew far fewer comments than the average post on Trump does. Why is that? I think we may have we reached a point where this sort of reeking sleaze is so par for the course in Democratic “war on women” rhetoric that even Republicans don’t get too exercised about it. It’s just something Democrats say, like how every Republican policy, foreign and domestic, can best be understood as part of an unspoken racist plot. It’s a pretty sweet deal to be able to casually compare your opponents to ISIS and have virtually no one, many of those same opponents included, bat an eye.

If we’re going to insist on making terrorist comparisons, though, Kevin Williamson has a question: Isn’t the outfit that’s actually beheading people a better analog to ISIS?

On the one hand, we have people using the techniques that made 60 Minutes famous to expose what is, after all, only reality — the reality behind a contentious public debate too often characterized by a refusal to deal with the facts. We have activists and politicians who want to use that reporting to reform the law and public practices, and maybe to influence the nation’s morals, too, in the hopes that Americans’ attenuated moral instincts have not been extinguished entirely. Some terrorists.

On the other hand, we have knife-wielding killers slicing through the faces of newborn children — children with beating hearts — to get at the prize behind as the green-eyeshades types in accounting demand “More brains!” like they’re in some old zombie movie. But it isn’t a movie: It is real life, and real death. More livers, too — 50 more a week, as one lip-smacking ghoul dreamed of retailing.

Herself is horrified by one of these. That she is horrified by the wrong one is no surprise to anybody who is familiar with the career of Hillary Rodham Clinton, for whom the phrase “the banality of evil” is far better tailored than her pantsuits.

Two clips for you here, one of Scarborough and the other of Rubio on Hugh Hewitt’s show yesterday marveling at what a candidate as desperate as Hillary will resort to. To the extent that some in the wider media are surprised that her terrorist comments didn’t get more play, I think that’s the reason why. The point of this demagoguery was so obviously a clumsy ploy to try to distract from her own political troubles that they feel obliged to punish her for the clumsiness at least, if not the actual insult.

The key bit comes at 2:20. The Free Beacon is celebrating this for Scarborough’s beastmode pro-American rant but that rant is in service to an odd knock on GOP candidates. Why is the party of Reagan seemingly so bearish about America these days, he grumbles? We’ve got an energy revolution happening in the midwest, we’ve got the world’s best universities, we’ve got the Chinese bubble starting to burst. We’re all lined up for a new American century — except, to listen to Republican candidates these days, you’d think it’s “midnight in America,” as Mike Allen puts it.

But it’s not midnight. The Republican message is more that it’s 4 a.m. in America, very dark but on the verge of brightening significantly. Come to think of it, that’s the message of every party that’s out of power in virtually every presidential election cycle. If America’s continuing greatness is a fait accompli driven by technology and economic dynamism irrespective of which party holds power, then the electoral stakes are small. That’s an inspiring message for a No Labels type like Scarborough, not so inspiring if you’re a committed partisan. How do you get the GOP rank and file to turn out for you, never mind swing voters, if the subtext of your campaign is, “We’re America, baby, we’ll be golden no matter what”? Besides, it’s not true that Republican candidates are relentlessly gloomy. Rubio in particular is running on a Reaganesque “morning in America” message; his campaign slogan is “A New American Century,” for cripes sake. And for all the Democrats’ gloom about income inequality and wage stagnation, Hillary will naturally spend the next 16 months trumpeting the strides that America’s supposedly made on both issues under Obama’s leadership. If you don’t counter that by stressing how bad things are, especially on foreign policy, voters will have less of an incentive to hand the White House to the other party next year. That’s politics 101, even in Reagan’s time. Why beat up on the GOP for it now?